400+ Artists Sign Letter Asking NEA to Reverse 'Prejudicial Changes' to Grant Restrictions

As BroadwayWorld reported earlier this month, Trump's arrival at the White House continues to have a massive effect on the arts in America. Aside from changes at the Kennedy Center, The National Endowment for the Arts recently announced extensive updates to 2026 grant guidelines, with new restrictions on grants for programs that will "promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)". Read about the new legal requirements in full here.

According to the New York Times, in response, 463 artists have signed a letter to the National Endowment for the Arts asking them to roll back the new measures. Signees reportedly include Pulitzer-winning playwrights Lynn Nottage, Jackie Sibblies Drury, and Paula Vogel. Read the letter in full below:

To the National Endowment for the Arts:

We are artists, playwrights, choreographers, performers, musicians, and workers from many parts of the arts and culture sector. All of us have benefited from the NEA’s grant making activities, either directly from the Endowment’s support for the institutions that have developed and presented our work, or indirectly but no less importantly from the role that the Endowment has played in creating the vibrant and diverse arts ecosystem of which we are grateful to be a part.

We are writing to express our tremendous disappointment that the NEA has made the short-sighted decision to change its compliance requirements for the Grants for Arts Projects, conforming to Trump’s reactionary and discriminatory executive orders. The orders in question, Executive Order nos. 14173 and 14168, are being challenged in the courts, and will likely be invalidated on statutory and Constitutional grounds. In fact, parts of EO no. 14168 have already been enjoined.

While the arts community stands in solidarity with the NEA, we oppose this betrayal of the Endowment’s mission to “foster and sustain an environment in which the arts benefit everyone in the United States.” We ask that the NEA reverse those changes to the compliance requirements.

We recognize that our colleagues at the NEA are in a difficult position. Perhaps the hope is that by making these compromises, the Endowment will be able to continue its important work. But abandoning our values is wrong, and it won’t protect us. Obedience in advance only feeds authoritarianism.

Trump and his enablers may use doublespeak to claim that support for artists of color amounts to "discrimination” and that funding the work of trans and women artists promotes “gender ideology” (whatever that is). But we know better: the arts are for and represent everybody. We can’t give that up. The NEA must not abandon these principles—or these artists. Artists are not in the business of promoting ideology (whatever that means). We are compelled to tell our truths, to create community around the stories that give life to those truths, and to make common cause with others while we share this time on earth.

The arts have a particularly important role to play in times of political crisis. When national identities fracture and the public sphere shrinks or becomes increasingly contentious, the arts serve as an indispensable source of memory, imagination, and envisioning. The arts community, which the NEA both supports and is a part of, must stand together in the face of those who would erase our memories, cramp our imaginations, and blinker our vision.

In this spirit, we ask the NEA to reverse these prejudicial changes to its compliance requirements, and refuse to implement any further such restrictions going forward.